The Clerk's Eyewitness Testimony

If I was defending my client against a robbery conviction and the main evidence was the clerk’s eyewitness testimony, I would tell the jury that it is not a completely valid testimony. Being robbed, the clerk was in a state of panic and distress, which could cause him or her to not clearly see who is robbing them. And without camera evidence it is almost impossible to validate if what he/she is true. Eyewitness testimonies shouldn’t be taken as main evidence because who is to say that the testimony is 100% true? The human mind is good at blaming others for mistakes that they want answers to. The face of the robber would not be something the clerk would be specifically interested in at the time of the robbery. The clerk would be more preoccupied

Reconstructive memory is crucial to an understanding of the reliability of eyewitness testimonies as the recall of those testimonies can be subject to personal interpretation values, and the way one makes sense of the world. For instance, many people may believe that storing information is like recording and remembering is like playing back what was recorded. However, memory does not work this way. In actuality, we do not store information exactly as it is given to us; rather, people extract from information the general meaning. We make sense of information by trying to fit it into schemas (which are a way of organizing information). It is noteworthy to understand that schemas may be determined by social values and consequently, prejudice. Therefore, schemas are capable of distorting ambiguous or unconsciously information in order to fit in with our present knowledge or schemas. This can therefore, result in an unreliable and not accurate eyewitness testimony. So I say this, should we really convict a man on the basis of sole memory? Just because memory can be foggy and gritty and ambiguous, does not mean my client’s life in jail should be as